| Kasz216 said: No.... it's the Ultimtum Game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game So uh. Right back at you I guess? There are actually quite a number of games like that, including the prisoners dilema you mentioned and the dictator game. |
Ah, I'd never actually heard of that... probably because I don't think it's much of a "game" in this regard.
But when I look at the experimental results section, here's what I see:
"In industrialized cultures, people offer "fair" (i.e., 50:50) splits, and offers of less than 20% are often rejected. One limited study on monozygotic and dizygotic twins claims that genetic variation can affect reactions to unfair offers, though the study failed to employ actual controls for environmental differences."
In other words, your assertion that people typically reject the offer isn't quite accurate. It's also not really a realistic game, since there's no ongoing effects of a rejection or acceptance. If someone were to be put in a position of only being the second player, and never being identified (always anonymous), they would almost certainly always accept whatever is offered, because there's no ongoing advantage to rejection.
The big irony, here, is that the Ultimatum Game was actually played by US's Republican party quite recently. They were offered a rather even-handed deal (regarding the debt ceiling and related things), and they rejected it, practically out of spite. It's irrational (indeed, the only rational action of the second player in the ultimatum game as described by wikipedia is to accept whatever offer is made, unless they are offered nothing), and it's harmful, but it's what they did. Of course, in reality, it's an iterated version of the game where sides take turns making offers, and the Republicans were basically trying to get a situation where they could get 100% of what they wanted by rejecting any deal that gave anything less.
